Wednesday, 30 December 2015

One of the very few useful things politicians do is to
inadvertently increase the general level of merriment among the rest of us. I
have mentioned here before the British politician who said of some proposed new
coercive measure for making people do what the government wants them to do that
it was ‘Less top down stick, more bottom up carrot’. Now, a Russian politician
on a visit to a rifle range has managed to, quite literally, shoot himself in
the foot.

Actually, the expression ‘To shoot oneself in the foot’ is
now mostly used incorrectly, or, since meaning is now it seems determined by
majority usage, has changed its meaning: people now say of someone who has done
something hilariously inept, and damaging to himself, that he has shot himself
in the foot, the suggestion being that it was a clumsy accident. But the
original saying, dating I think from the First World War, referred to a careful
deliberate action which, though it damaged its perpetrator, could also save his
life. If you shot yourself in the foot, it would certainly hurt, and you would
be in trouble if there was a suspicion you had done it on purpose. But you
would have rendered yourself useless as a soldier, and so would be taken away
from the terror and misery of the front line.

Monday, 28 December 2015

Sorry not to have written anything here for a couple of days; I am doing that complicated thing, buying a small piece of land, and considering what to put on it. Favourite so far is something I'm afraid I won't be able to find here in Greece; it was made by someone in America. Just look at this:

Saturday, 26 December 2015

Were I to draw up a list of un-favourite words, ‘Inappropriate’
would be near the top, along with ‘Hi!’, ‘Absolutely!’ and of course ‘Hopefully’
used non-adverbially.

I few days ago I was reading an article about Asperger’s
syndrome and it said that Asperger’s people often gave ‘True but inappropriate’
answers to questions. I can’t remember the example the article used, but here’s
one I made earlier:

Mr Normal is ringing up Mr Asperger; the dialogue goes like
this:

Mr N: ‘Hi, Mr A, what are you doing?’

Mr A: ‘Er — I’m talking to you on the telephone.’

You see? ‘True, but inappropriate.’ But what ‘should’ A have
replied? Should he have guessed that N didn’t really want to know what A was doing right now, but rather what he had
been doing before the ’phone rang, or perhaps would be doing later? But no, A took the question literally, and in
fact if so taken then his answer was both true and appropriate. (True but
inappropriate answers might be ‘I’m breathing’ or ‘I’m balancing vertically on
the soles of my feet’.)

My sympathies (as you’ve probably guessed) are with Mr A.
Why should he have to guess what N really
wants to know? Why can’t N say what he means and mean what he says? English
verbs have no shortage of tenses; why should A be forced to (all but) lie,
simply because N can’t be bothered to use any but the present continuous?

‘Normal’ people think they must make ‘special allowances’
when dealing with Asperger’s types, when actually the boot is on the other
foot: Mr A is obliged to accept that the Ns of this world, who are
unfortunately the majority, rarely say exactly
what they mean, or mean exactly what
they say. They are always lying, or very nearly so. Faced with the Cretan Liar
paradox in nearly all his encounters with it, no wonder Mr A finds the world so
puzzling.

Tuesday, 22 December 2015

At a poetry reading once, a woman in the audience asked T.S.
Eliot what he meant by the line ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper
tree.’ He replied ‘I meant “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper
tree.”’ One can just imagine the prim, tight-lipped, bank-clerk smile with
which he said it; imagine, too, the titters of the audience and the mortification
of the woman who had asked.

The bastard. The smart-arse. The total shit. Yet he was
right. Of course, if he’d been a nice man, (which he wasn’t), he’d have gone on
to explain, which he didn’t.

The point is, if there had been a clearer way of saying what
he wanted to say, then, if he was a good poet, (which he was), he would have
used it. Poetry is in the business of extending the boundaries of language; of
what can be said. It will seem strange, even incomprehensible, at first; it
will take time for the rest of us to catch up. Lines that seemed nonsense a
hundred years ago often seem quite clear now. Sometimes it takes longer; Gerard
Manley Hopkins was born just a hundred years before me, and his poetry, though
most of us can now see how good it is, still seems strange:

Sunday, 20 December 2015

The Danish government, which had already sacrificed its few remaining principles in order to keep the support of the extreme right, is now considering passing a law allowing the police (and / or I suppose customs and immigration officers) to search the luggage of immigrants to, as the BBC in its pussy-footing way says, 'help pay for their stay'. We have not yet been told if special provision will be made for immigrants with gold teeth.

Wednesday, 16 December 2015

Not this Simon,
but a local man, actual name Yorgos, who took the nickname Simon. This can lead
to confusion in this tiny island, as we have other similarities, not least of
which is a love of machinery that extends to making strange devices. Yorgos has
the advantage of access to unlimited scrap metal and broken machinery as his
family has a scrap yard; the only one in the island.

In this yard he found a large hydraulic something-or-other
which had been part of a JCB belonging to his brother. He would look at this
longingly and finally his brother let him have it. Soon afterwards he announced
excitedly in the bar of an evening what he was going to make with it. ‘Yes,
yes, bravo old thing,’ I said. (In thirty-odd years in Greece I have got used
to people’s ‘going-tos’ and tend not to take them seriously.) But the fact is,
he’s done it. To do so he had to buy, from England, a special two-stage
hydraulic pump and various other bits and pieces. It has cost quite a lot, but it
doesn’t matter; it’s an amazing device and he is justly proud of it.
Furthermore, because of the big demand for firewood, it won’t in fact take him
long to recover the cost.

‘Go to’ (as they say) YouTube and look for Alonnisos09,
(note the spelling), where you will find several of Yorgos / Simon’s videos,
including one that shows his hydraulic log-splitter in action. The whole thing
is mounted on its own trailer so that it can if necessary be taken to where the
wood is rather than vice-versa.

Tuesday, 15 December 2015

I have just added ‘The Escape of Sigmund Freud’ by David
Cohen to my bedtime reading shelf. This tells the story of Freud’s leaving
Vienna — only just in time, and variously helped and encumbered by daughter,
sister, wife, dog etc. — and, after a week or two in Paris with Princess Marie
Bonaparte, finally getting to London and settling in — where else? — Hampstead.
Well, actually the southern end, where Belsize Park merges into Chalk Farm, but
NW3 has ever since been the home of psychoanalysis.

It would by any account be an adventure story, and it has
been told before — my favourite bit is when SS officers came to him in Vienna
and made him sign a paper declaring that they had not ill-treated him, and he
added — confident that SS officers would not understand irony — the P.S. ‘I
heartily recommend the SS to everybody.’ But what distinguishes Cohen’s account
is that he examines the neglected sub-plot of the rôle of Anton Sauerwald,
appointed by the Nazis to take over Freud’s Vienna practice.

I was surprised to find recently, courtesy of ‘Karnac News’,
(an e-mail newsletter on psychoanalysis and related matters), about twenty
minutes of home-made film, taken by Anna and others, and with a commentary by
Anna, of the flight across Europe, and Freud’s last birthday party in London.

Of course, this was back in the days when England had a
civilized and humane attitude to those seeking refuge from persecution.

Monday, 14 December 2015

One good reason for learning at least the elements of
grammar, logic, maths and science is that, thus armed, one is less likely to be
fooled by politicians, whose speciality is saying something that is,
technically or literally, just about true, but which they can be reasonably
confident will be misunderstood by most of the public, who will think the
politician has done something wonderful when he has in fact done something
dreadful or nothing at all.

This morning, for instance, VOA told us that President Obama
has ‘Shrunk the rate of acceleration of carbon emissions.’ Now leaving aside
the curiously mixed metaphor, par for the course among populist radio
announcers, what does this actually mean? Is he farting less? Well, let us
allow that here President Obama is a synecdoche for American Industry. Does it
mean that American Industry is now emitting less carbon, that is to say, carbon
monoxide and dioxide, than it was before Obama was elected? No, it doesn’t say
that. Does it mean then that carbon emissions are at least not increasing? No,
nor that. Does it mean that the yearly, or daily, increase (say, 20% more each
day) is not itself increasing? No; that, staying with the curious notion of ‘acceleration’
in an attempt to understand what he is said to have done, is merely the speed with which carbon emissions are
increasing daily. Does it mean, then, that at least it’s a steady speed of
increase, that there is no acceleration? (say, 20% more today than yesterday,
but 40% more tomorrow than today.) No, it doesn’t even mean that. It means, if
anything, merely that the rate of
acceleration (the acceleration of the acceleration, if you can handle that)
is not increasing. To carry the strange metaphor a little further, Obama (or
American Industry) has not taken his foot off the accelerator, has not even
kept the accelerator in the same place, is indeed continuing to push the
accelerator towards the floor. BUT (Gosh, three cheers) he’s not actually pushing
it down any faster or harder than he was before. We are supposed to
congratulate him?

Saturday, 12 December 2015

There are as many kinds of Philhellenism as there are Philhellenes.
Byron of course: his love of Greece was as great as his love of freedom, and he
came to Greece to offer what help he could in the liberation of Greece from
Turkish rule, and died here. (Not in battle, but from malaria contracted in the
unhealthy marshes of Missolonghi.) That Byron was a frightful poseur and closet
transvestite, thrilled to discover that it was acceptable for men to wear
skirts here, detracts from this not one jot: the mere presence of an English
Lord and celebrated poet on their side did wonders for Greek morale. (‘Jot’, by
the way, derives from the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet: iota
subscript.)

Then there are the ‘Glory that was Greece’ types, with the
emphasis firmly on the ‘was’ — professors of Ancient Greek who are disappointed
to discover that the locals seem not to understand them when addressed in a
2,000 year old language spoken with the artificial Erasmian pronunciation;
these go home when they discover that ‘Olympus’ is actually pronounced
‘Olly-boss’.

Last and least are the people who come on holiday, claim to
have ‘fallen in love with the place’, regard every Greek they meet as a ‘quaint
local character’ and make no attempt to engage with Greek culture.

Not quite last: there are also some who come to see what it’s
all about, like it enough not to bother to go ‘home’ when their two weeks are
up, stay, learn the language, settle, and have more Greek friends (and enemies)
than they ever had where they came from. I believe it is to this last group I
belong, and that this gives me an excuse, even a right, to tell what I think I
have learnt of the place, the people, and the culture.

Friday, 11 December 2015

Earlier this year, a literary festival held near my home town in England ran a competition for a detective story in 100 words. I did it in 99, but didn't win, and forgot all about it. Just now, in tidying my hard disc, I found my entry, and thought it might do as a small pearl to cast before you:

‘Obviously strangled,’ said inspector Lestrange, examining
the dead drummer. ‘The suspect could be one of the band. Who might dislike the
drummer, I wonder?’ ‘All of them I should think, sir,’remarked his assistant, an amateur musician.
‘We’d better wait for the pathologist.’

When he arrived, Doctor
Trepan took one look at the victim’s neck and said ‘The guitarist, from
behind.’ ‘Good Lord sir, how d’you reckon that?’ ‘Take a look at those marks.
Both sides, but the ones on the right have broken the skin. Guitarists have
short nails on the left hand and long on the right.’

Thursday, 10 December 2015

On BBC World Service 'News' (now a vulgar populist magazine chat show) yesterday I heard that a film is to be made of Nathaniel Philbrick's book 'In the Heart of the Sea'. I remember reviewing this book for the 'London Magazine' some years ago, and have just recovered my review from my hard disc:

A Whale ain’t Nothing
but a Fish

In the Heart of the Seaby
Nathaniel Philbrick. Harper Collins, £16.99

On November the 20th 1820 the
Nantucket whaleship Essex, sailing in
the Pacific somewhere between the Galapagos and Marquesas Islands — about as
far from land as she could be — was rammed by a sperm whale and quickly went
down. The entire crew of twenty escaped the wreck, but only eight made it back
to Nantucket. One of these was the First Mate, whose account was published soon
after his rescue. Only twenty or thirty years ago the cabin-boy’s account was
found, and it differs in more than just writing style. Using these and various
secondary sources Nathaniel Philbrick (No doubt it’s bad form to say so, but
the name is perfect) tries to reconstruct the full story.

So far, so good — well, appalling of course, I mean good
for the reader — but we are also told loudly, not just by the publishers in
their hyperbolic press release, but also on the title page, that this is ‘The
Epic True Story that Inspired Moby-Dick’

Now just a minute. ‘Inspired’? I was about thirteen and
interested chiefly in wireless, not at all in arty matters, when I sat goggling
in awe through the Hollywood film with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. My
vocabulary contained useful words like ‘Pentode’ and ‘Superhet’, not
‘Symbolism’ or ‘Allegory’. Nevertheless when I came out of the cinema I had the
new knowledge that it is possible to say something about one thing by talking
about another: Ishmael had been telling us about something much bigger than a
whale. Such considerations seem not to trouble this book’s author or publisher
any more than they did the producers and directors of the film. To inspire is
to provide with a plot, Ahab was seriously weird, Ishmael that fashionable
thing a survivor, whale-oil was what the Pequod
was after, and Moby Dick was just a big fish. (Yes, a fish — Melville
himself insists on this.) Ultimately this doesn’t matter: ordeals and quests,
especially sea-quests, have always caught the imagination, and it would take
more than Hollywood crassness to conceal their wider implications and deeper
significances. Much of Moby Dick is
written in a flippant pseudo-scientific style, and it may be only hindsight
wisdom that credits — if it is a credit — Melville with deliberately setting
out to write something meant to enter the canon of big-L Literature.

The opening chapter of In the Heart of the Sea tells how the white settlers of Nantucket
took to whaling and how Quakers — pacifist toward humans, but not toward whales
— came to dominate a close-knit, rigid, typically small-island society. It
seems women had unusual power in Nantucket — the men were away for three years
and home for three months — but (perhaps for the same reason) many were
addicted to opium. The obsession with whaling is well-illustrated by the odd
pieces of knowledge Philbrick has picked up: young men would wear small items
of harpooning gear in their lapels so that the girls, pledged to marry only
successful whale-hunters, could be sure in their choice. A mother is pleased
when her little boy uses a dinner-fork tied to a ball of wool to harpoon the
cat. We are also introduced to Thomas Nickerson, joining the Essex as cabin-boy. While there is much
here that is clearly backed by research, as a sprinkling of quotation-marks
shows, there is also a lot of the speculation common in popular historical
reconstruction. Philbrick spares us ‘Little did he know on that fateful day…’
but there is plenty of ‘Must have’ ‘Probably’ and ‘Doubtless’ and at least one
‘Fate had in store’.

Most of the book is taken up with an account of the Essex’svoyage, its sudden end and the harrowing events that followed. A
straightforward ripping yarn. Only a few days out, with an inexperienced
captain, the ship is taken broadside and tipped on her beam-ends by a squall.
Two whale-boats are lost; a dispiriting start. Later there is a near-mutiny
when rations run short in fo’c’sle and steerage, but the central event is of
course the sinking, and this is described vividly and without too many explanatory
asides or speculations on the crew’s feelings. Rammed twice, the ship sank to
top-deck level within ten minutes. Astonishingly, those aboard got off in the
spare boat, and a black steward evenmanaged to salvage compasses, quadrants and nautical almanacs. The two
other boats had been out catching whales. Twenty men in three open boats in the
middle of the pacific…

What became of them is told well, and sometimes with more
detail than may suit many readers’ stomachs. Nantucket Quakers die hard; when
lots are drawn to see who shall be eaten some men object: gambling is wrong.

At the time much was made of the whale’s unsporting
conduct, and it seems still to puzzle present-day writers. Given what
whaleships set out to do, and the now-proven intelligence of their prey, naïve
readers such as myself might wonder why it didn’t happen all the time. Perhaps
the poor benighted beasts are better pacifists than their hunters.

For the thorough-going and scholarly there are fifty
pages of notes, with no distracting indices in the main text, and a ‘select’ (a
mere 150-odd books and articles) bibliography. For the rest of us there are two
generous wodges of photographs: vast whale jaw-bones, survivors in later life,
contemporary illustrations and documents, even a fantastic seventeenth-century
engraving of a cannibal orgy. There are also maps: one of the Essex’s voyage from Nantucket to the
point where she sank, and another showing the routes of the ship’s boats.
Necessarily, the first shows half the world, and the second the South Pacific
from Polynesia to Chile, the equator to Cape Horn. The imagination boggles at
the distances sailed.

There is much else to strain belief. How was it possible
that Owen Chase, dying of thirst and hunger, often too weak to pull himself up
to the gunwales of his tiny boat, kept a log? It was this log, written up later
by his literary friend William Coffin, that Melville read before writing Moby Dick. Even more surprisingly the
cabin boy Thomas Nickerson also made notes and some fine sketches of the
disaster, some of which are reproduced here. His work was only discovered just
before Philbrick started writing.

Harper Collins paid a quarter of a million pounds for the
right to publish this book, and seem to have invested as much or more in
publicity for it. They have decided to make it a best-seller, and it probably
deserves to be, though not for its literary qualities. It’s none the worse for
being nothing to do with Literature with a capital ‘L’, only for pretending to
be: it tells us no more about Moby Dick than a history of the Danish court does about Hamlet.

Wednesday, 9 December 2015

Yesterday
evening at our tiny bookshop here in Alonnisos we did a presentation, with
speeches and readings in English as well as Greek, about the popular Greek poet
Nikos Kavvadias, whom I have translated. Kyriaki gave a talk in Greek, followed
by one in English from me. Two young local Greeks read some of the poems in
both Greek and then in English translation, and Costas Kyriazis sang some
musical settings of the poems. The event was well-publicised, by posters, word
of mouth, Dave’s website, and individual e-mails. The shop was packed;
standing-room only, with an enthusiastic audience. Nearly all Greek — mostly the local
people who, though knowing little English, enthusiastically support the English
Pantomime — one French, one Swede, and one Italian. NOT ONE SINGLE ENGLISH
PERSON from the large Ex-pat 'community' turned up. Yet in England people
complain that 'they' (i.e. immigrants) form cliques and don't engage with
British culture. I felt foolish and ashamed as I explained, in English, to a
Greek audience who knew him well, who Kavvadias was, but everyone was kind,
appreciative and understanding and expressed surprise, disappointment and even
in some cases disgust at the total indifference of the English.

All that by way of preamble:
I should like it known that from now on the many English people who come to me
asking for explanations of some Greek document will be told where they can put
it.